Ox-bone soup

Seolleongtang 설렁탕

Ox bone soup is very popular all year round in Korea, but especially in the winter. This is my mother’s recipe. When I was young, sometimes in the winter she used to make us drink it every morning and every night until we got tired of it. “It’s good for your body, take some, you will grow taller” : )

In Korea, ox leg bones (called sagol 사골) are very expensive. When I came to America for the first time about 20 years ago, I couldn’t believe these bones were so cheap!

Advertisement

The milky broth is achieved by simmering for hours and hours. There’s no rule for how many hours you have to boil it, but you need simmer until you get a milky broth, and the bones are smooth with no more meat sticking to them. All the bone marrow should be boiled away so that there’s a cavity in the center of each bone. The inside of the bones should look like a sponge.

Koreans like to joke that if a Korean husband sees his wife making this soup, he starts to get nervous. He knows he’s going to be eating the soup for days or even weeks!

“Why she is making this? Is she going to leave home for days? Maybe she will visit her parents or take a trip with her friends?”

So, when he sees the wife boiling bone soup, he may say ask: “Where are you going?” : )

It’s served with rice and kimchi; you don’t need many side dishes when you serve this. If you keep this soup in the fridge, and warm rice in the rice cooker, and some kimchi and beef portioned out in the fridge, you’ll have instant meals for a long time, all you have to do is heat it up. I heard that some American housewives do a similar thing with lasagna. They make a big batch before they go away, so their husbands and children will have delicious food to eat until they come back.

Don’t ask me: “Maangchi, I want to make only 1 bowl of this soup.” This is the smallest batch of ox-bone soup that I can imagine! I used to make it with 10 pounds of bones: ) So just make a lot, and eat it over a few days.

Ingredients (for 6 servings)

Directions

Soak the ox bones and the beef in cold water for 20 minutes to remove any blood.

Rinse bones in cold water a couple of times to remove any bone chips. Drain the water.

Boil 14 cups water (3½ quarts) in a large pot

Put the bones and beef into the pot of boiling water. Boil for about 10 minutes.

Turn off the heat and take out the bones and beef. Get rid of the water.

Rinse and drain the meat in cold water to remove the excess fat.

If you only have one pot to use, clean it thoroughly with kitchen soap.

Put the bones and the beef back into the pot

Add about 12 cups of water (3 quarts), 1 medium size onion, and 1½ pounds of peeled radish to the pot. Bring to a boil over medium heat.

When it starts boiling about 20-30 minutes later, lower the heat to simmer for 3 hours.

Turn off the heat and take the beef and radish out of the pot. Leave the bones behind.

Put the beef and radish into a bowl.

Pour the brownish broth out of the pot and into a large bowl. We’re going to keep boiling these bones and collect the broth into this collecting bowl as we go along. Keep it in the fridge during this process.
If you have a larger pot, you could keep boiling the bones and adding water over hours and hours, but with a small pot we need to do it in stages and collect in this collecting bowl.

Fill the pot with water again (about 3 quarts) and boil over medium high heat for about 20 minutes. When it starts boiling, lower the heat and simmer for 2½ to 3 hours.

Turn off the heat, open the lid, and pour the broth into the collecting bowl. It will be a lot whiter than the first time we poured it out.

Fill your pot with water again and boil over medium high heat for about 20 minutes. When it starts boiling, lower the heat and simmer for 2½ to 3 hours.

Turn off the heat, open the lid, and pour the broth into the collecting bowl. This time it will be really white, but thin.

Cool down the collecting bowl and cover it with plastic wrap. Keep it in the refrigerator for several hours until all the fat floats to the top and gets solid. This is going to be our bone soup.

Let’s serve!

Take the bone soup out of the fridge. Remove the solid fat from the top with a spoon or strainer.

Add a few slices of the beef and radish to the soup. Serve with warm rice and kimchi, along with chopped green onions, minced garlic, salt, and black ground pepper.

Add some salt, chopped green onion, and black ground pepper to the soup. Mix it well with your spoon. You can add warm rice to the soup and enjoy!*tip: The amount of salt you put in depends on your taste, but I suggest starting with 1 ts and adding more if it’s too bland.

Spicy version:

Tear about 1 cup worth of cooked beef into thin strips. Put them in a mixing bowl.

I use one very large pot and just keep an eye on the water. It makes it harder to skim and discard the fat, unless you wait until after you put it away in containers and refrigerate. But, as long as you do the first boil, discard, and clean the pot, you’ll be fine!
Hope that helps!

Hi Maangchi, I’ve tried you recipe and it’s so delicious! I want make more soup for my family. but my question is, after I make more soup, can I keep the soup in freezer to freeze it for keeping it for long time, like a month?

Hi!
I’ve been wanting to try this out for ages and starting now. My water after taking out the beef and mu didn’t reduce. Are we meant to keep the lid on or off? I read that we take it off but I don’t understand how the water is meant to reduce?

Hi! I love all your Korean recipes. My boyfriend and I got hooked onto Korean food while addicted to KDrama! I just want to know, is it possible making this and galbitang using pressure cooker? Thanks!

I grew up on this, and cannot wait to attemp it on my own. I just didn’t realize the steps Eoma took to make it so milky white. I thought she threw the oxtail, radishes, seasonings, and water in a pot, and poof! I guess a little more goes into it! Thanks for all the great recipes!!!

I prepare gori-gomtang quite often – I don’t always use seolleongtang, chicken-stock works nicely, too; ox-tail is more tasty and better for a hearty soup than any other part. “My” recipe is roughly the same as for galbitang – influenced by gomtang ;-); sometimes I use gori and galbi together. I use less water/stock and a pressure-cooker or a crock-pot (depends on how much meat I have to prepare and how much time there is).

Serve with kkakdugi, chives, garlic cut in slices (lengthwise. Lots of! ;-)) with a little sesame-oil, sesame-oil with salt, black pepper, rice and kkaennip.
That’s about how they serve it in a small restaurant at Song-do Haepyeon in Busan – not the fancy tourist-place (“Song-do Gori-chip”), but the small, modest place west across the street, further away from the beach. You find it on daum.net – “Nam Ch’on Seolleongtang ( 남촌설렁탕 )” is the name of the place.
Best Gori-Gomtang ever!

Hello maangchi. I love this recipe and i want try it. Can you help me?. I want to ask you about what kind of ox bones it is? If it is leg ox bones, should i discard the skin from bones?, cause in my country the leg bones is always with the skin. Sorry if my english bad. :)

you probably didn’t boil the bones enough the first time (when you discard the water).
the point of this part is to boil out most of the blood from the bones. if you don’t boil it long enough, the soup turns a brown color instead of opaque.

There are two things that guarantee white colour:
1. All traces of blood have to be removed. This is why soaking bones and rinsing them after the first boil is so important.
2.You have to actually boil the broth instead of simmering it. Unless the temperature is high enough to extract minerals from the bones it will never turn white, even after 10 hours.

yes, it’s normal. As mooshoofooie mentioned, the brown color comes from blood. Keep boiling over low heat and pour it out to a pot, then add water and boil it again. The 2nd batch will turn out milky white broth. Then pour it into the first batch. The color will be ok. If you boil 3rd batch, the color will still be milky but thinner. Making bone soup never fails if you keep boiling.

Hi Maangchi! I have a question on the recipe. If we cook the beef flank and mu with the bones, and we need to wait overnight for the fat in the soup to solidify, does that mean we need to store the cooked mu and flank overnight as well? In your video you had the soup you made from the previous evening so the mu and flank were used right after cooked. Can we just cook the bone soup with only the bones, and then on the second day, put the flank and mu in the soup and cook together longer before serving?

“does that mean we need to store the cooked mu and flank overnight as well?” yes, keep the cooked beef and radish in an airtight container in the fridge until you serve the soup. “Can we just cook the bone soup with only the bones, and then on the second day, put the flank and mu in the soup and cook together longer before serving?” Yes, you can do that, but cooking radish and beef will take a long time.